CHAPTER 2
The darkness pressed against my eyes like a physical weight.
Cole's hand found my wrist in the black, his grip familiar and grounding. The gun was still in his other hand—I could hear the faint creak of his knuckles adjusting around the grip, that particular sound of tension and readiness.
"Stay behind me," he breathed.
"You already said that."
"I meant it both times."
The quilt had slipped off my shoulders somewhere between grabbing for my jeans and processing the gun.
I was half-dressed, barefoot, my heart still slowing from what we'd just done, and now there was someone in the bar above us.
The ventilation system had fallen silent with the power outage, and without its hum, every sound from upstairs came through with terrible clarity.
Footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. Moving from the back hallway toward the main bar.
"Does this happen often?" I whispered.
"No."
"But it's happened before."
A pause. "Once. About six months after I opened."
"What happened?"
"Drunk off-duty cop. Forgot the buzzer code. Kicked the door in." He shifted his weight, and his bare shoulder brushed against my arm. "This isn't that."
"How do you know?"
"Because the door didn't break. Someone let themselves in."
My stomach dropped. The magnetic lock on the alley door was heavy-duty—Cole had shown me the specs once, proud of the way it could withstand a battering ram. If someone had gotten through it without smashing it, they either had a key or they knew how to bypass the system.
"How many people have keys?"
"Three. Me. You. The cleaning crew."
"I don't have a key."
"You have the code." His voice was barely a murmur. "Different thing."
The footsteps upstairs stopped. Then started again, closer now, directly above the staircase that led down to the hallway outside the panic room. The old iron spiral staircase—thirteen steps, Cole 's joke about bad luck suddenly not feeling very funny.
"This room," I said. "How secure is it?"
"Steel door. Reinforced frame. Deadbolt and keypad." He paused. "It'll hold."
"You hesitated."
"I didn't—"
"You paused before you said it. You never pause. You're the most deliberate person I've ever met."
In the dark, I felt rather than saw him turn toward me. His thumb traced a small circle on the inside of my wrist, an intimate gesture that felt wildly out of place given the circumstances.
"I paused because I was thinking about whether the backup generator would kick in," he said. "It should have by now."
"Should have?"
"It's a generator. Sometimes they don't."
The footsteps upstairs went quiet. Not fading—just stopping, like whoever was up there had found what they were looking for and were standing still. I strained my ears, trying to pick up any sound. The creak of a floorboard. The scrape of a glass against the bartop. Anything.
Silence.
"How long do we wait?" I asked.
"Until the generator kicks in or the sun comes up. Whichever's first."
"The sun's not up for another two hours."
"Then we wait two hours."
I pulled my wrist free of his grip—gently, not in anger—and fumbled in the dark for my shoes. My fingers found the canvas of my sneakers, the laces still tied from when I'd kicked them off earlier. I shoved my feet into them and stood up, the concrete floor cold even through the soles.
"What are you doing?" Cole asked.
"Getting the rest of my clothes on. If someone's breaking into your bar, I'm not going to face them wrapped in a quilt."
"I told you to stay here."
"And I told you I'm not doing that." I found my jeans where I'd dropped them, pulled them on, and wrestled my t-shirt over my head. "You're not going up there alone."
"I've done this before."
"Done what? Confronted intruders in the dark with a gun and no backup?"
"The fire service had some crossover."
"This isn't a fire, Cole."
The silence that followed was heavy with everything he wasn't saying.
I knew his file—not because I'd gone digging, but because after the accident five years ago, I'd been curious enough to look up the man who'd pulled me out of the car.
Nineteen years with the department. Multiple commendations.
A warehouse collapse in 2012 where he'd gone in after a trapped crew when everyone else said it was too dangerous.
The beam that had ended his career had fallen after he'd already gotten the last person out.
He wasn't the kind of man who waited in basements while someone else handled the problem.
"Generator should have kicked in," he muttered again.
"Maybe it's not the generator. Maybe someone cut the power."
He didn't answer, which was answer enough.
The footsteps started again—closer now, heavier. Someone was at the top of the spiral staircase. I could hear the slight vibration of the old iron as weight settled onto the first step.
"Cole."
"I hear it."
The second step. Then the third.
"Panic room code," I said. "How hard is it to crack?"
"Six digits. Ten thousand possible combinations if they don't know the sequence."
"And if they do?"
The footsteps stopped on the fourth step. A voice floated down—male, rough, slightly slurred.
"Cole? You down there?"
The tension in Cole's shoulders changed. Not relaxed, exactly, but rearranged—like a chess player recognizing an opening instead of a threat.
"Who is that?" I asked.
"My brother." He said it flatly, without relief. "Stay here."
"The gun—"
"Is still in my hand. Stay. Here."
He keyed in the code, and the door swung open.
The emergency lights in the hallway had finally flickered on—weak, battery-powered LEDs that cast the spiral staircase in a sickly yellow glow.
I followed him anyway, ignoring his order, because I wasn't about to hide in a basement while he confronted a family reunion in the dark.
The man on the stairs was younger than Cole by maybe five years. Same build, more or less, but softer around the edges—the kind of softness that came from late nights and bad decisions, not age. He was holding onto the railing with one hand and squinting down into the dim light.
"Shit," the man said. "You're actually here."
"What are you doing here, Marcus?" Cole's voice was ice.
"Needed a place. Your apartment was dark. Figured you'd be at the bar." Marcus gestured vaguely upward. "Door was open."
"The door is never open. It's on a magnetic lock."
"Huh. Well, it was open tonight." The slur in his voice was more pronounced now. Bourbon, maybe, or something stronger. "Power went out after I got in. Whole block's dark, I think."
Cole was still holding the gun. He hadn't raised it, but he hadn't put it down either.
"You broke into my bar at four in the morning."
"Didn't break in. Door was—"
"You just said it was open. You also just said you assumed I'd be here and came looking. Which is it?"
Marcus blinked, processing the question with the deliberate concentration of a man who knew he was caught. "Can we not do this on the stairs? I've been driving for six hours."
"You drove here drunk?"
"Got drunk after I got here." He nodded toward the bar above. "You've got that bourbon. The one with the vanilla."
Cole didn't move. For a long moment, the two brothers stared at each other in the yellow emergency light, and I saw something pass between them—a history I wasn't privy to, written in the hard line of Cole's jaw and the pleading slump of Marcus's shoulders.
Then Cole lowered the gun.
"Upstairs," he said. "Now. Before I change my mind."
Marcus turned and climbed, his footsteps unsteady on the iron grate. Cole waited until he was out of earshot before turning to me.
"I told you to stay."
"I didn't listen. We've established this pattern."
"I noticed." The ghost of a smile flickered across his face, then vanished. "My brother's here. That's what this was. A false alarm."
"A false alarm with an unlocked door and a power outage."
"The power outage is probably the storm that's been threatening all week. The door..." He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. "The door I'll figure out. Marcus is a lot of things, but he's not a liar. If he said it was open, it was open."
"And he came here because he needed a place?"
"It's what he does. Every few years, when things get bad. Shows up, stays a week or two, disappears again." Cole started up the stairs, his bare feet silent on the iron. "I'll get him settled and come find you."
"Find me where?"
A pause. "The panic room. If you're still willing."
I thought about the bed, the fern, the smell of cedar and laundry soap. The way Cole's body had felt pressed against mine in the dark.
"I'll be there," I said.
Upstairs, the emergency lights had kicked in—a few battery-powered strips along the baseboards that cast the bar in a dim, underwater glow.
Marcus was already behind the counter, pouring himself another two fingers of what I recognized as the aging experiment.
Cole's aging experiment. The one he'd called me up at four in the morning to taste.
"Put that down," Cole said.
"It's good bourbon."
"It's six months of work, and you're drinking it like it's well whiskey."
Marcus looked at the glass, then at Cole, then at the glass again. He set it down with exaggerated care. "Sorry. Manners." His gaze slid to me, and for the first time he seemed to register that his brother wasn't alone. "Didn't realize you had company."
"This is Mara. She works here."
"At four in the morning?"
"She lives here. Temporarily." Cole came around the bar and took the bottle from Marcus's hand. "Go sit in the back booth. I'll make coffee."
"Don't want coffee."
"I didn't ask."
Marcus shuffled toward the booth, and in the dim light I got a better look at him.
The same dark hair as Cole, but unkempt.
The same broad shoulders, but hunched in a way that suggested he was trying to make himself smaller.
His clothes were rumpled, a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, and there was a bruise on his cheekbone that was just starting to yellow around the edges.
"Trouble at home?" I asked, keeping my voice low.